Ruminations: Selected Philosophical, Historical, and Ideological Papers, Volume 2, Dawns and Departures

By Eric v.d. Luft

From the Preface:

Since the 1970s I have pursued three separate but overlapping and sometimes simultaneous careers: (1) philosopher / writer / teacher / historian of the long nineteenth century, 1789-1914; (2) editor / translator / photographer / publisher / biographer / encyclopedist; (3) cataloging librarian / rare books and special collections librarian / historian of medicine. Somehow these three vocations have garnered me some acclaim, even an entry in Who's Who in America. Each of them has resulted in some published or presented works.

Because these works have been scattered in a wide variety of venues, some of which have gone out of print or have otherwise become generally unavailable - and of course with the oral presentations being gone as soon as they are given - I have thought it wise to select, epitomize, and bring them together in one place - here. Thus, what follows in these volumes is what I consider to be the most important of my shorter works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gegensatz Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781933237985

Eric v.d. Luft

Eric v.d. Luft earned his B.A. magna cum laude in philosophy and religion at Bowdoin College in 1974 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1985. From 1987 to 2006 he was Curator of Historical Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He has taught at Villanova University, Syracuse University, Upstate Medical University, and the College of Saint Rose, and is listed in Who’s Who in America. Luft is the author, editor, or translator of over 600 publications in philosophy, religion, history, history of medicine, and nineteenth-century studies, including Hegel, Hinrichs, and Schleiermacher on Feeling and Reason in Religion: The Texts of Their 1821-22 Debate (1987); God, Evil, and Ethics: A Primer in the Philosophy of Religion (2004); A Socialist Manifesto (2007); Die at the Right Time: A Subjective Cultural History of the American Sixties (2009); and Ruminations: Selected Philosophical, Historical, and Ideological Papers (2010).

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Preface and Acknowledgments (for all volumes)

Since the 1970s I have pursued three separate but overlapping and sometimes simultaneous careers: (1) philosopher / writer / teacher / historian of the long nineteenth century, 1789-1914; (2) editor / translator / photographer / publisher / biographer / encyclopedist; (3) cataloging librarian / rare books and special collections librarian / historian of medicine. Somehow these three vocations have garnered me some acclaim, even an entry in Who's Who in America. Each of them has resulted in some published or presented works.

Because these works have been scattered in a wide variety of venues, some of which have gone out of print or have otherwise become generally unavailable - and of course with the oral presentations being gone as soon as they are given - I have thought it wise to select, epitomize, and bring them together in one place - here. Thus, what follows in these volumes is what I consider to be the most important of my shorter works.

I wish first to thank all the gracious editors and publishers who have given me permission to use writings that originally appeared in their journals, proceedings, or anthologies.

I wish especially to thank all the following fine people for their respective - sometimes perhaps unwitting or even reluctant - roles over four decades in the development of the various components of this anthology:

Co-authors and collaborators: the late Godfrey Belleh, Lucy Bowditch, Kathy Faber-Langendoen, Diane Davis Luft, and Doug Stenberg.

Mentors: the late Joe Derbyshire, the late José Ferrater Mora, Bill Geoghegan, George Kline, the late Doug McGee, the late Ed Pols, Christine Ruggere, and the late Isabel Stearns.

Enablers: Stacey Ake, Ásgeir Beinteinsson, Terry Belanger, Jeff Bell, Julia Boyd, the late Dave Brewer, John Burbidge, Clark Butler, Dave Cartwright, the late Naomi Chernoff, Terry Culbertson, Bob Daly, William Desmond, Greg Eastwood, the late Arthur Ecker, Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, the late Gloria Flaherty, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Steve Greenberg, Barb Hamilton, Jennifer Hamlin-Navias, Hjördís Björk Hákonardóttir, Peter Hodgson, John R. Jacobson, Walter Jaeschke, Gene Kaplan, Gwen Kay, Jodi Koste, Vince Kuss, the late Quentin Lauer, Lee Lerner, Burke and Gene Long, Sarah Luft, Bill Maker, Bruce McKittrick, Mikael Karlsson, Doug Moggach, Chris Moose, Angela Moreira, Jo Moyer, the late Sue Murray, Carole Novick, Pat Numann, Rob Olick, Páll Skúlason, Bob Perkins, Max Piety, John Powell, Lynne Prunskus, Ruth Richardson, Susan Rishworth, Katie Salzmann, Hans-Martin Sass, Neil Schlager, Kay Sherman, Larry Stepelevich, Peter Stillman, Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, the late Tom Szasz, Peter Uva, Lilla Vekerdy, Merold Westphal, and George Weaver.

Nemeses: Scott Davis, the late Jean Potter, Toby Vargrim, Don Viney, Robert R. Williams, and the late Gretchen Worden.

Contents - Volume 1, Part 1 - The Infinite

I. Circles: Cartesian and Hegelian

I.1. The Cartesian Circle: Hegelian Logic to the Rescue

I.2. "'Who's That in Your Saddle?' - A Hegelian Interpretation of Wagner's Ring"

II. Pathways to and from Hegel

II.1. Five Undergraduate-Level Introductions to Hegel: A Comparative Review

II.2. "An Early Interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit"

II.3. Travelling in Denmark with a Small Map of Europe: The Importance of Subjectivity in Hegel's Thought

II.4. Commentary on 'The Historical Dialectic of Spirit: Jacob Boehme's Influence on Hegel' by David Walsh

II.5. A Letter Concerning Kenley Dove's 'Hegel and Creativity'

III. Hegel and Religion

III.1. The Theological Significance of Hegel's Four World-Historical Realms

III.2. The Place of the 'Hinrichs Foreword' Within the System of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion

III.3. Review Article: The Unfolding of Hegel's Berlin Philosophy of Religion, 1821-1831

III.4. Hegel and Judaism: A Reassessment

III.5. "Review: Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews"

III.6. Would Hegel Have Liked to Burn Down All the Churches and Replace Them with Philosophical Academies?

IV. Philosophy of Religion

IV.1. "The Empirical Version of the Ontological Argument and the A Priori Version of the Cosmological Argument"

IV.2. Toward a Definition of Religion as Philosophy

IV.3. Reason Judging Religion: Hume or Hegel?

IV.4. What is Living and What is Dead in (the Spirit of) Christianity

IV.5. "Review: James C.S. Wernham, James's Will-to-Believe Doctrine: A Heretical View"

IV.6. The Nonsense of Atheism: A Reply to Professor Davis

V. A Debate about Hartshorne

V.1. "Review: Donald Wayne Viney, Charles Hartshorne and the Existence of God"

V.2. In Defense of the Global Argument: A Reply to Professor Luft (by Donald Wayne Viney)

V.3. On the Nature of Multiple Arguments for the Reality of God: A Counterreply to Professor Viney

VI. Cool Reflexion on Hume

VI.1. Hume's Epistemological Purpose in 'Of Miracles'

VI.2. Toward a Hum(e)an Bioethics

VI.3. Simplicity and Complexity in Hume's Theory of Perception

VI.4. Hegel's Inadequate Reading of Hume

VII. Heidegger and Hegel, Heidegger and Gadamer, Heidegger and Nietzsche

VII.1. Commentary on 'Hegel and Heidegger' by Robert R. Williams

VII.2. "Review: Karin de Boer, Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel"

VII.3. Commentary on 'Heidegger's Hermeneutic Path' by Lawrence K. Schmidt

VII.4. Sources of Nietzsche's 'God is Dead!' and its Meaning for Heidegger

VIII. Philosophy of Philosophy

VIII.1. Disputes and Quarrels as Philosophical Devices: Conceits, Contrivances, or Concepts?

VIII.2. "Review: Paul S. Miklowitz, Metaphysics and Metafictions: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the End of Philosophy"

VIII.3. "Review: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Terence Irwin"

VIII.4. Schopenhauer as Self-Critic

IX. Cassirer's Symbolic World

IX.1. Cassirer's Dialectic of the Mythical Consciousness

IX.2. "Review: Thora Ilin Bayer, Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary, with an Introductory Essay by Donald Phillip Verene"

IX.3. "Review: S.G. Lofts, Ernst Cassirer: A 'Repetition' of Modernity, foreword by John Michael Krois"

X. Medieval Iceland, Amor Fati, and Visions of the Future

X.1. "Dialectics and Destiny: A Look at Predetermination in Njál's Saga"

X.2. "Dostoevskii's Specific Influence on Nietzsche's Preface to Daybreak" (with Douglas G. Stenberg)

X.3. "Review: Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Michael Tanner"

Contents - Volume 1, Part 2 - The Finite

XI. Philosophy of Art

XI.1. Toward a Unified Concept of Art

XI.2. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art: Aestheticist or Contextualist?

XI.3. Commentary on 'Francis Bacon: Plan and Accident' by Thalia Welsh

XI.4. The Church of the Ascension, New York City: Environment, Ritual, and the Philosophy of Art (with Lucy L. Bowditch)

XI.5. Physiognomy, Phrenology, and the Origins of Racial Classification: The Artistic Anatomy of Sir Charles Bell

XII. Philosophy of Medicine

XII.1. Stuffing up the Cracks or Falling Through Them: How a Philosopher Does History of Medicine

XII.2. Conflict of Interest in Right-to-Die Cases

XII.3. Philosophical and Religious Aspects of the Medicalization of Assisted Suicide and Capital Punishment (with Kathy Faber-Langendoen)

XII.4. Nomenclature as the Legitimation of Complaint: The Terminological History of Fibromyalgia (with Diane Davis Luft)

XIII. Hegel and Medicine

XIII.1. The Birth of Spirit for Hegel out of the Travesty of Medicine

XIII.2. Hegel's Philosophy of Medicine

XIV. Women as Doctors, Women as Patients

XIV.1. Elizabeth Blackwell (1832-1910): The Modern World's First Woman Physician

XIV.2. Sarah Loguen Fraser (1850-1933): An Early African-American Woman Physician

XIV.3. Physicians' Attitudes Toward Women Patients in the Nineteenth Century

XV. History of Medicine

XV.1. Arthur Ecker's Contributions to Pain Management

XV.2. Medical Curriculum in Upstate New York, 1809-1940

XV.3. The Search for Miracle Cures in the Nineteenth Century

XV.4. Edward Cutbush, M.D. (1772-1843), Founder of the SUNY Upstate College of Medicine

XV.5. Commentary on 'Cullen, Hume and the Philadelphia Medical School' by Nina Reid-Maroney and on 'Who Made Up the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Medical World?' by Roger Emerson

XV.6. "Benjamin Smith Barton's Elements of Botany (1803): A Retrospective Book Review"

XV.7. The First Ovariotomy

XVI. Libraries: Repositories of Civilization; Librarians: Guardians of Culture

XVI.1. Surviving the Danger Period: Collection Development in Medical Special Collections

XVI.2. Rare Book Catalogers and the Internet

XVI.3. Financing North American Medical Libraries in the Nineteenth Century (with Godfrey S. Belleh)

XVI.4. Two Bibliographical Notes

XVII. Social and Political Ethics

XVII.1. Edgar Bauer and the Origins of the Theory of Terrorism

XVII.2. Some Ethical Aspects of the Meaninglessness of Genealogy

XVII.3. The Dynamics of Forgiveness

XVII.4. The Mutual Influence of Rock Music and Antiwar Politics in 1968

XVIII. Two Poems

XVIII.1. "Grimmesdämmerung"

XVIII.2. "Iliados A, 49"

1.

Letter about Nietzsche to The News, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges (1983)

Bryn Mawr College undergraduate Leann Ayers generated controversy on February 4, 1983, when she named Nietzsche Pig of the Ages in her column in the student newspaper. Four energetic letters of rebuttal appeared in the February 11 News, including mine. Writing this letter was only what I saw as my duty as a scholar to correct an inaccurate representation of Nietzsche, but Professor Richard Bernstein, then of Haverford College, told me that he considered it the best thing I had ever written. On that recommendation alone, it is reproduced here:

*

Although Leann Ayers certainly has a perfect right to dislike Nietzsche, her opinions, as expressed in The News of Feb. 4, seem to be based only on a longstanding, common, and utterly false stereotype of his life and thought. She would do well, if she is to form any opinion at all, to form it according to a careful and accurate apprehension of pertinent facts. In this case, a more studious reading of the text is demanded.

Nietzsche is easily misinterpreted, and this is largely his own fault. His vivid, striking, richly metaphorical language creates a tendency in the reader toward soaring flights of imagination. But even Nietzsche himself recognized this danger, and thus warned us in the preface to Morgenröte (Daybreak) that we should learn to read him well - i.e., slowly. Like so many difficult authors, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Joyce, and so on, Nietzsche rewards diligent scrutiny, whether we finally agree with him or not.

To say that Nietzsche hated women is a typical distortion. Both his biography and the German text of his works testify that he was really no misogynist at all and no more a sexist than most European men of his age. The misinterpretation of this issue is partially due to a basic problem of translation. In English, unfortunately, there is no immediate distinction to be made between die Frau and das Weib, but both must be rendered by the single word, woman. The fact that this distinction is untranslatable does quite an injustice to Nietzsche among English readers. When Nietzsche uses die Frau, he is speaking kindly about women, and only when he uses das Weib is he showing contempt - but contempt for what? Not for the female sex per se. This truth can be seen by examining the German terms: Die Frau is equivalent to the Latin femina, and therefore denotes just a human being who bears rather than begets children; but das Weib, on the other hand, equivalent to the Latin mulier, generally carries a derogatory or condescending set of connotations. In other words, das Weib indicates all those socially imposed or acquired traits, usually associated with women, which Phyllis Schlafly applauds and which feminists detest, such as passivity, weakness, submissiveness, self-effacement, self-image as a sex object, shallow narcissism based on physical features, pretense toward cuteness and stupidity, worship of male-oriented goals, women's intuition, a woman's prerogative to change her mind, etc. In a nutshell, das Weib does not indicate the natural human condition of women, properly understood.

Nietzsche, therefore, does not not attack womankind. Instead, very much the ally of late twentieth-century feminism, he savagely attacks those characteristics of women which prevent women from each achieving their true individual potential, which keep them second-class human beings, servants, slaves, sex objects, and which they could discard, and thus free themselves, with a little effort, if only they would recognize that these charactertistics are not natural feminine qualities, but rather, have been unnaturally assigned to women by an ancient male hierarchy.

Let us now reconsider the passage from Zarathustra upon which Ayers based her judgment:

First of all, when Nietzsche says in the discourse entitled Von alten und jungen Weiblein ("Of Old and Young Little Weibern") that das Weib is to be only pregnant and an object for male recreation, he is merely describing and criticizing a present situation and absolutely not advocating such an arrangement. Nietzsche hates all forms of human submission and lack of assertiveness, including the way women have allowed themselves historically to become unnaturally dominated by men.

Second, the infamous whip metaphor: Who could provide the definitive interpretation of that one? Indeed, the image goes deep into Nietzsche's psyche, as is proved by the Lou Salomé incident, wherein she was photographed sitting in a cart holding a whip over him. Just as we cannot legitimately quote Shakespeare himself as saying, in every honest hand a whip, because it was not he, but his character Emilia, who said it in Othello, IV.ii.142; so for the same reason we cannot legitimately attribute Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht! to Nietzsche, because his character, not he himself, but a little old woman who, later on in the book, in a reprise of the whip image, is identified with Life, is actually the one who says it. This second passage, in the discourse entitled Das andere Tanzlied, is written in a rather humorous way, and probably has more to do with how to live a life than with how to deal with women. Whatever the whip image means - and I confess I do not know - it surely is not disparaging toward women. The simplest thing we can conclude about this image, and about Nietzsche's attitude toward women, is that it is complex.

As for Ayers's charge that Nietzsche's alleged sexism is the product of a disturbed mind, there is no evidence that Nietzsche was insane before the sudden collapse in the winter of 1888-89.

In order to nip in the bud any subsequent diatribes which may accuse Nietzsche of racism, consider that Nietzsche's blond beast, which Hitler saw as the symbol of the Aryan super race, was in fact, for Nietzsche, a lion, only a lion, plainly and simply, a lion.

Pig of the Ages is a good idea! We need to identify and condemn those who have contributed materially to making our lives as miserable as they are. But, if you are looking for a genuine misogynist pig - and I mean PIG in neon letters - then the man you want is Schopenhauer, not Nietzsche.

2.

Excerpt: Editor's Preface, Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his 200th Birthday (1988)

Arthur Schopenhauer sought nearly his whole life to be recognized as having achieved greatness in both philosophy and literature. He only began to see the fruits of these labors in the last decade of his 72 years, but he must have died confident that his fame would continue its growth toward the level achieved by his two heroes, Kant the philosopher and Goethe the litterateur. While Schopenhauer's fame certainly never has reached and probably never will reach either of those two levels, his position in human intellectual history is secure, and some discussion of both his thought and his literary influence is likely to continue as long as thought and literature themselves continue.

Few philosophers are great writers, and few writers are great philosophers. Thus Schopenhauer belongs in very select company along with Plato, Nietzsche, Camus, and the few others who have excelled in both fields. He did not write systematic philosophy as such, but what one might call literary philosophy. That is, he took pains to make his work accessible, lively, and interesting to the non-specialist in academic philosophy, to the so-called intelligent layperson, or to anyone who would obey his calls to read the book twice (The World as Will and Representation, translated by E.F.J. Payne [Indian Hills, Colorado: Falcon's Wing, 1958; New York: Dover, 1966, 1969], vol. 1, p. xiii), to read Kant (vol. 1, pp. xv, xxiii), and to read his entire published corpus (vol. 1, pp. xiii-xiv, xxviii; vol. 2, passim).

Although Schopenhauer is certainly more prosaic and less aphoristic than Nietzsche, they still have their main genre, criticism, in common - and probably much more. So, at least because neither makes for ponderous reading, we may approach Schopenhauer in much the same philosophical spirit as we would approach Nietzsche - whatever we may determine that spirit to be. (To read either Schopenhauer or Nietzsche in the same spirit as we would read Aristotle, Spinoza, or Quine would be entirely inappropriate, but we could perhaps build a case for reading Schopenhauer in the same spirit as we would read Hume.)

It is always interesting and often useful to ask whether the individual character or personality of a philosopher affects his or her thought, and whether our knowledge of that character and personality illuminates that thought for us. For example, does it help us to understand Hegel if we know that he was a friendly and generous fellow? Do we know Kantianism better if we know that Kant was embarrassed by sex? Would an increase in our knowledge of Plato's life mean an increase in our knowledge of his philosophy as well? Of course, we need not succumb to the excesses of Kaufmannization in the posthumous psychoanalyses of Nietzsche, Hegel, et al. That is, we need not believe with Walter Kaufmann - in Hegel: A Reinterpretation, § 23, Hegel's Illegitimate Son - such things as that the birth of ... Ludwig in Jena had some effect on the content of the Phenomenology. But we can still ask such questions seriously if we are willing to be circumspect in formulating our conclusions.

Schopenhauer's character and personality provide a feast for reflection on their possible relation to his philosophy. ... We know that Schopenhauer was an anglophile, a political reactionary, a crusty curmudgeon, a womanizer / misogynist, a rich kid, a snob, a self-routinized machine, a paranoiac, a fastidious dresser, an engaging wit, a gourmet, and a profoundly sensitive lover of art, music, and theatre. We know about his jealousy, megalomania, wrath, and sheer hatred in his relationships with his mother, Hegel, the housemaid he threw downstairs, the 1848 revolutionaries, and many others. Here I will draw no conclusions with regard to the possible effects of these and other traits upon his thought, but will only suggest that it is seldom justifiable for an interpreter to try to separate a thinker's whole thought from his or her life, especially in the cases of impassioned philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer.

But what of Schopenhauer's philosophy itself? Of course, Schopenhauer was not an academic - at least not after the debacle in Berlin - but can his thought yet be considered academic? In other words, is Schopenhauerianism a fit topic only for the classroom or does it have claim to any wider application - in the life-world at large, for instance? Lest anyone be tempted to believe that the most fundamental issues to which Schopenhauer addressed himself are nowadays of interest only to philosophers, historians, and other cloistered (and often sterile) academic types, rather than to everyday people; or lest anyone be tempted to believe that what concerned Schopenhauer as a thinker does not concern us as human beings - that is, lest anyone suspect that Schopenhauer's thought today ... is just an intellectual curiosity and not something which contains matter of real and perennial existential import, consider ...

Issues of existence vs. non-existence do indeed affect us all; yet, since few of us, except philosophers, have the inclination or the courage to admit that fact, such issues are generally relegated to the domain of merely academic discussion. But Schopenhauer, if we listen to him, can easily crush the false sense of security which we may have acquired as the result of that relegation. Like Qoheleth, Schopenhauer puts life in this world in its stark and essentially uninviting perspective - and then demands that we confront it, accept it, and make the best of it.

However, is it possible to live by Schopenhauer's philosophy? Was it even possible for Schopenhauer himself to live by Schopenhauer's philosophy - or were his life and his thought each a lie relative to the other? He preaches resignation, yet he was not resigned. He preaches compassion, yet he does not seem to have been particularly compassionate, except toward animals. He seems not to have been a happy man - and I, for one, am not inclined to have much confidence in the words of philosophers with souls as tormented as was Schopenhauer's. After all, philosophy should be a source of comfort, perhaps the supreme source, as it was for Socrates, Boethius, and Spinoza. Isn't that why we do it? By none of this am I trying to suggest that Schopenhauer was hypocritical - for indeed, I believe that he was completely sincere - but even if he were a hypocrite ... well, sometimes we can learn from what people say if we ignore what they do. And maybe none of us should be blamed for falling short of our highest self-established ideals.

Certainly it is true that professional philosophers study Schopenhauer and impart him to their students less now than they did a century ago. Nevertheless, despite this current lack of strictly philosophical influence, Schopenhauer's influence on literature today is as strong as it ever was. As a case in point, consider Anne Rice's popular - and critically acclaimed - 1985 novel, The Vampire Lestat.

Rice's character Lestat torments himself with the tension between the necessity which has been imposed upon him to do evil and his own proclivity to do good or at least to make goodness come out of his actions. He cannot abide his nature. He enjoys the pleasures of hunting and killing, but cannot endure the guilt of hunting and killing by stealth; thus he longs to exhibit himself as what he is to the whole world, even though such an exhibition would increase his vulnerability by many orders of magnitude and would probably lead to his death. He does not wish to be a secret predator, but a blatant predator, and in that way perhaps cease to be a predator, by inducing others to put his tortured being to rest. Even though the nature of a murderous feind has been imposed upon him. Lestat tries to do as much good as this nature will allow; he is very selective about his victims: ... the particular kind I wanted - a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse. ... a young male with a grizzled beard who had murdered another in some far-off place on the other side of the world ([New York: Ballantine, 1986], p. 6); ... more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood (p. 11).

As a young mortal in pre-Revolutionary France, Lestat had been driven by three fundamental passions: the desire for immortality, the desire to learn the answer to the riddle of existence, and the desire to accomplish some good service for the world. These three desires could, of course, have been satisfied by Christianity in traditionally established ways - but Lestat found to his dismay that he could not force himself to believe in Christianity, however much he tried and however earnestly he sought its solace. He rejected Christianity primarily because of its cruelty, which Rice symbolizes in Lestat's memory of the old priest of his village scaring the children with tales of the Church burning witches:

"'Do you remember the story of the witches? The time you cried at the witches place?'

"'Cried over the witches?' I looked at him blankly for a moment. But it stirred something painful, something humiliating. Too many of my memories had that quality. And now I had to remember crying over witches. 'I don't remember,' I said.

"'We were little boys. And the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the blackened ground.'

"'Ah, that place.' I shuddered. 'That horrid, horrid place.' ...

"But I hadn't thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it - the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burnt alive.

"Nicolas was studying me. 'When your mother came to get you, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales.' ...

The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our own village, that they had been innocent. 'Victims of superstition,' she had said. 'There were no real witches.' No wonder I had screamed and screamed (pp. 47-48).

A faint chill passed over me, but it was the mere shadow of the anguish I'd felt as a child when I'd heard those awful words 'roasted alive,' when I had imagined the suffering (p. 53).

Lestat thus gradually became conscious of the utter meaninglessness of life, which terrified him because it was opposed to the meaning which he needed either to find or to create. His terror, heightened by his fear that his mother would soon die of consumption, culminated in what he called his Dark Moment, when he realized that even his quest for ultimate answers would probably also be thwarted:

"We were talking rapidly, cursing the meaninglessness ...

"I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.

"'But that's just it,' I said, 'we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.' ...

"'... We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over!' ... 'We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!' ...

"There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed.

"The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged.

"No one was ever going to tell us anything! ...

"I couldn't stand seeing the pure emptiness, the silence, the absolute absence of any answer ...

"I stared at everything, seeing behind every configuration of color and light and shadow the same thing: death. Only it wasn't just death as I'd